Beholder…

Sometimes I’m a little weird, and a bit nerdy… I was checking out some of the other participants of this duo-tangle challenge (see my original submission here)… someone titled their post Eye of the Beholder, and my brain when straight to a Beholder, from the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

Then I thought, “How cool would it be if I drew a Beholder with the tangles Drupe and Poke Root?”

So I started drawing and I came up with this ZIA (zentangle inspired art)… Enjoy 😀 …

Oddly the hardest part was trying to come up with 11 different colors for the eyes… each eye including the big main eye is capable of a different magical ray, so I felt that each eye should have it’s own color.

When I showed this to my geeky husband, he not only liked it but kept commenting on the mushroom-y-ness that it reminded him of… and then he remembered that there is a monster in D&D that looks like a Beholder but is actually a flying fungal ball called a Gas Spore.

I had a lot of fun playing around with tangles and RPG monsters… heehee. 😀

Until next time…
~nic

P.S. With the smile and the floating eye, it kind of reminds me of Douglas Adams “Don’t Panic”, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy… heehee.

It seems to me that zentangle patterns can be accomplished with 6 steps or less… online and in books these 6 steps are defined in a ‘step-out’ that is very easy to follow. Some patterns are a bit more challenging than others, but for the most part all are pretty easy. If you slow down and do one stroke at a time you can make any pattern. Once the pattern is placed on the page, replicated, and then possibly shaded, it takes on a life of it’s own and looks really cool. I jumped right in, going to the official blog (zentangle.com) to find out what it was all about. Then going to tanglepatterns.com to pick out some patterns to play with. Tanglepatterns.com has an immense amount of information… not only is it a great place to find an index of hundreds of patterns (and strings), but there are tutorials and FAQs as well. Just click around and your questions will most likely be answered. 🙂

The basic premise is this: There are no mistakes – just try to make those marks part of your pattern. Anyone can do it. Take a 3.5in square sheet of paper (preferably art paper or an art tile), place a dot in each of the four corners with a pencil (2B is good because it blends into shading well). Connect those corners creating a box with the pencil. Then draw a string (with the pencil) within the box – it can be any shape (tanglepatterns.com has some string ideas). Then with a black pen (preferably a sakura micron 01 – goes down on paper nice and once you start to shade it doesn’t bleed too much), draw patterns in each of the spaces created by the string. That is Zentangle. I hope this helps. 😀